In Detail

Adding beautiful and dynamic user interfaces to your web applications can be time consuming but is a crucial part of development. jQuery UI lets you harness appealing visual features in your web application with minimal effort and hassle. JQuery UI Starter is your one stop solution to overcome this challenge.

"Instant jQuery UI Starter" covers all the utilities of jQuery UI that you will need to create stunning visual interfaces. Diving into core features and customization in an approach broken down into 3 key sections (Widgets, Interactions and Effects), you'll be guided step-by-step through engaging examples to let your creativity flow.

This book gradually introduces you to JavaScript and jQuery so you understand what you are doing with UI, and why you are doing it. You'll look at the popular Widgets section and will learn how to customize them with JavaScript objects.

Once you learn how easy it is, you'll effortlessly move on to Interactions, followed by Effects. If you are interested in a quick and easy-to-follow book - this is it. In jQuery UI Starter you will learn how to utilize the library with any project you choose. You'll understand how to use the API and add any additional features you might want.

Approach

Get to grips with a new technology, understand what it is and what it can do for you, and then get to work with the most important features and tasks.A quick and easy-to-follow book on jQuery UI, it's is packed with the features of jQuery UI that you need to know to enhance your web applications.

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at people who have heard about jQuery UI but don't feel like they've had a thorough introduction.

This is a very short and sweet introduction to using jQuery UI. My knowledge of jQuery in general is that a) it exists and b) the function it exposes is named $, and I had no problem following along with the examples.

As a short introduction to jQuery UI the book starts with a refresher on jQuery/Javascript and then moves into showing you how to download and set up a simple page. It then proceeds to go through a few examples of jQuery concepts, such as creating widgets and styling them and using visual effects.

On the whole I thought the book was pretty good. My rating would be 3.5/5, but I have bumped it up to 4 here because I thought it was above average. My one real gripe with the book is that there are examples for a couple of simple widget types (sliders, buttons), and then you are urged to use the web to find out what other widgets exist and how to use them.

While I realize this is meant to be a short book, a simple example that shows off more of the most common widgets would have been nicer, even if it did mention that you should look at the docs to get more info on them.

I will also point out that there are some problems of an editing/typographical nature as well as code errors.

For example, there is an snippet that talks about selecting Sodas but the code example has comments talking about Cars instead.

Also, in the example on drag and drop, code is presented that shows how to keep a count on the number of items that have been dropped in the container, which doesn't work 100% as advertised (the used event, 'out', triggers in cases other than what the author seems to think).

Despite these flaws, the book is good overall, and I would recommend it to beginners that want to get their feed wet with jQuery UI.

For more intermediate/advanced jQuery users, this book may not be for you as it doesn't go into a lot of technical detail, and a quick skim through the documentation is probably all you would need to get up to speed.

A very easy to understand introduction to jQuery UI with clear examples. Each example focuses on a particular feature or concept, making them easy to digest. The book title sets what you should expect from this book perfectly.

Only reason the review was 4 instead of 5 stars, was the lack of a .zip/.tgz download file of the examples.